During the coronavirus pandemic, we’ve all become keenly aware that there are certain jobs that need to be done for society to function at even its most basic level. As a nation, America has found it easy to call essential workers heroes and offer up nightly clapping and Blue Angels flyovers — harder to provide well-deserved hazard pay, personal protective equipment, and safer working conditions.
Collectively, it’s important for us to remember that essential workers are the heroes of their own stories, not just peripheral players in the stories of others. The following novels center the lives and experiences of mail carriers, grocery workers, healthcare providers, custodians, and other people with essential jobs, whose full humanity — on the page, as in life — far exceeds the boundaries of their job descriptions.
Keiko Furukura applies to work at the Hiiromachi Station Smile Mart on a whim as a teenager and ends up staying for 18 years. Prone to unusual impulses, she finds that the clear rules of social engagement and chance to copy the speech patterns and behaviors of other employees provide a path to relative normalcy. She becomes one with the store and outlasts countless managers, coworkers, and customers. But when she hits 36 without marrying, starting a family, or pursuing a more prestigious career, she must decide how much of herself she is willing to give up to conform to the entrenched expectations of others. After reading Murata’s English-language debut, you will never look at convenience stores or their employees quite the same way again.
Hare’s debut novel follows Lawrie Matthews, a young Jamaican immigrant who travels to war-ravaged London aboard the Empire Windrush in 1948. He begins to carve a place for himself, working as a postman by day and playing jazz music in Soho clubs by night. When both he and a white woman walking her dog discover the body of a Black child near a pond, racist police are quick to dismiss the other witness and eager to pin the crime on Lawrie or any other member of the growing West Indian community.
In this dystopian thriller, the totalitarian regime controlling people’s lives is an Amazon-esque mega-corporation called Cloud, which dominates both the retail and labor markets. After a series of mass murders have shut down all other stores, everyone either works for or is a customer of Cloud. Paxton reluctantly works as a Cloud security guard after his own business was bankrupted by their monopolistic practices while Zinnia works on the warehouse floor, though she is actually a secret operative on a corporate espionage assignment. Their story is interspersed with broadcasts to employees from Cloud’s billionaire founder, who is dying of pancreatic cancer. The book is dedicated to Maria Fernandes, who accidentally suffocated on gas fumes sleeping in her car while working three part time jobs.
Hospice worker Joanna comforts the dying and records the stories of their lives. She is the connective thread between the many residents and staff members at Pine Haven Retirement Facility, whose linked stories and memories and desires make up this book. McCorkle resists providing her complex, not-always-likable characters with easy closures, reconciliations, or happy endings, but delivers an impressive finale nonetheless.
Mengestu’s novel follows Sepha, an Ethopian immigrant running a small grocery store in a gentrifying neighborhood of Washington, D.C. Though born to an upper class family, he fled Ethiopia after his father’s murder and now socializes with friends from Kenya and the Congo who pursued more prestigious degrees and jobs in America than he did. When a white academic and her biracial daughter move next door, Sepha forms romantic feelings towards the mother and a tender friendship with the girl against the backdrop of simmering racial tensions in their neighborhood.
Frazier’s debut novel is about 18-year-old pregnant pizza delivery girl Jane, who lives in the suburbs of Los Angeles with a mother and boyfriend whose affections she finds smothering. When 39-year-old mom Jenny Hauser calls desperate for a pickles-and-pepperoni pizza for her son, Jane jumps to the rescue. She grows increasingly obsessed with Jenny and dreams of them escaping together, as she continues to deliver the special pizzas and works through the complicated legacy of her deceased, abusive, alcoholic father.
Prize-winning cartoonist Derf Backderf once worked as a garbage man himself. In this graphic novel, he tells the stories of a group of garbage collectors in a declining Ohio town, interspersing their daily challenges in the sanitation business with information about the history of garbage trucks, the ecology of landfills, and how rich neighborhoods generate more trash than poor ones.
In this installment in the Easy Rawlins series, Mosley’s detective has been working as a high school supervising custodian for two years while caring for a pair of adopted children. After an early morning liaison with a pretty teacher who claims her husband is threatening her, Rawlins finds himself a prime suspect of racist police when said husband and his twin turn up dead. The plot twists through a number of unsolved crimes from 1963, culminating on the day JFK is assassinated.
Man Booker finalist Mills, a former bus driver, tackles the ludicrous bureaucracies of the London bus system in this slim and entertaining novel. His unnamed bus driver protagonist and colleagues must navigate self-important inspectors, annoying passengers, road work, bicyclists, taxi drivers, a colleague who causes chaos by stopping for passengers in the middle of green lights, and more as they attempt to maintain fixed intervals between buses on a regular service, even when this is unattainable and absurd.
Reddi’s debut novel follows the arrival of immigrant farm workers from Punjab to California’s Imperial Valley around the time of World War I. They navigate complex relationships with family members back home as well as Mexican, Japanese, and other immigrant workers in California. With xenophobia rising among the white population, corporations exploit immigrants and laws prevent foreign citizens from owning land, bringing family members to the United States, and marrying interracially.
This debut novel from an emergency room physician centers the friendship of trauma surgeon Emma and pediatric cardiologist Zadie, who have been close to each other since childhood summer camp. When their former chief resident re-enters their lives, a tragic secret from their third year of medical school threatens to tear their relationship apart, while a difficult surgery that ends badly threatens the future of Emma’s career.
At the root of social inequality in this country is something we’ve ignored for far too long: housing. Where we live matters. Housing drives all sorts of disparities in the U.S.: health, wealth, education, employment, exposure to the criminal justice system, even happiness. Yet, where we live is no accident: It is the result of decades of laws, policies, practices that inscribed the blueprint for racial and social inequality across the nation.
In The Voucher Promise, I take a look at how we provide housing for those who need it most, and how it is both part of the problem and the solution. The country’s largest federal housing assistance program, housing vouchers (colloquially known as “Section 8”), are a cornerstone of U.S. federal housing policy. Policymakers meant for vouchers to provide the poor with increased choice in the private rental marketplace, they even hoped vouchers could be a tool to dismantle segregation. But it’s not quite so simple.
The book shows how vouchers shape the lives of families living in a Baltimore neighborhood called Park Heights. I tell the stories of the daily lives of homeowners, voucher holders, renters who receive no housing assistance, and the landlords who provide housing. The story of Park Heights tells the larger story of housing policies that confined Black residents to poor urban areas across the country—redlining kept Black homeowners out of the neighborhood until the ’60s, and blockbusting allowed them in under predatory terms.
Voucher holders disproportionately end up in this area despite rampant unemployment, drugs, and abandoned housing. While housing vouchers are flawed in their current form, they have great potential to be a tool to work our way out of decades-old residential patterns. With some key reforms, vouchers can be expanded to better resist landlord discrimination, offering recipients basic housing stability and the chance to live in a wider range of neighborhoods.
In order to understand the landscape of housing in Park Heights, it is important to understand the history of housing discrimination, which has affected the life chances and well-being of poor minority Americans throughout the history of this country. Even as the federal government deployed housing assistance as a key tool in its war on poverty and urban blight, and the legal system has been used to combat discriminatory housing practices, housing discrimination has remained deeply entrenched in both private and public practice, as well as in the law itself. A number of recent books examine the role that housing and housing policy have played in erecting the landscape of inequality we see across the country today.
In this epic account the Great Migration, Wilkerson tells the story of the generations of African Americans who picked up their belongings to flee the violent, segregationist South and trekked North, searching for the freedom to pursue a better life. This book, based on over 1000 interviews, bridges the divide between narrative and scholarship. Wilkerson follows the stories of three Black Southerners, and the three roads that many thousands of migrants took—following the major rail lines of the times—to cities like Detroit, New York, and Los Angeles. This population movement, from North to South, defines American cities today, setting the stage for a new era of Northern racist backlash, discrimination, and levels of segregation never before seen in American history.
In this now classic work, Massey and Denton propose that if we want to understand racial inequality today, we are missing a key link: segregation. Segregation, they say, is not a “natural” outcome of social and economic forces that shift populations around the city, nor is it a temporary process through which Black Americans have passed. The depth of segregation in urban areas is unprecedented, and it shows little signs of change. What’s more, segregation makes communities of color vulnerable, because it “intensifies and magnifies any economic setback these groups suffer and builds deprivation structurally into their social and economic environments.”
Massey and Denton elucidate the myriad private ways in which segregation has been reinforced over time, including the de facto mechanisms of segregation—the violent mobs of the early 1900s, threats, intimidation, and bombings of Black homes—even in the North. And they outline the institutionalization of discrimination within the real estate industry, and de jure (by law), throughout the mission of the Federal Housing Authority. These practices served simultaneously to keep Black Americans in poor segregated neighborhoods, while also aiding the departure of the white middle class to the suburbs.
Importantly, Massey and Denton argue that segregation is more than simply “living apart,” it is a planned, systematic “apartheid.” And until we dismantle both the private and public mechanisms that sustain it, we will continue to see the racial sharp divide among people in this country.
Rothstein builds on the work of Massey and Denton to argue that while previous scholarships has highlighted the private, informal, and “extra” legal practices that create and sustain segregation—unscrupulous real estate agents, predatory mortgage lenders, private residential covenants, angry mobs—in fact these practices were supported, and even enhanced, by explicit, de jure, law and public policy. He enumerates a range of policies from zoning law, to police “protection” (or lack thereof), “sundown towns,” deed restrictions, highway construction that ripped through communities of color, and wealth building tools such as the mortgage interest tax deduction—all of which support and sustain residential racial segregation. Rothstein emphasizes that the effects of these laws are ongoing and will continue to do damage until they are dismantled.
The failure of the U.S. to provide safe, affordable housing on a large scale, Taylor argues, is directly tied to the government’s outsourcing of housing to the private market. Profiteering investors have their own set of incentives, and building safe, affordable housing is simply not as lucrative as building million-dollar condos. From redlining—where Black Americans were excluded from federal homeownership financing—to what Taylor calls “predatory inclusion”—where they were exposed to real estate exploitation—U.S. federal housing programs have long been a tool to protect and promote the financial interests of the private banking and real estate industries, rather than those of ordinary people.
By retracing the footsteps of her own father—both a civil rights attorney and a property owner—Satter outlines an ecosystem of players who shaped the housing landscape in postwar Chicago. She tells the story of the federal policies that gave birth to a dual housing market, one for Black Americans and one for white Americans, and the landlords and speculators looking to profit from this state of affairs. A speculator is someone who takes on risk in order to make a profit, by buying low and selling high. In Chicago, in the first half of the 20th century, speculators did this at the expense of Black homeowners and their livelihood. A house that a speculator bought one month for $4,000 from a white family, could be sold the next to a Black family for $14,000. The harsh contract terms and inflated prices were not meant to “sell” the home to Black families, but to swindle them, push them out, only to defraud another family. This practice led to deferred maintenance, poor conditions, and overcrowding, and precipitated racial turnover and rapid neighborhood economic decline. In turn, this visible blight fueled white racism. Satter’s story is not of white flight from declining neighborhoods, but of white exploitation and plunder of what these neighborhoods did have—riches, in the form of housing stock—essentially, destroying these neighborhoods and the livelihoods of the people who had risked everything to buy a home in them.
Deploying mountains of comparative data from the last half-century, Patrick Sharkey shows how Black and white Americans live in neighborhoods that are so different they can barely be compared. While only 4% of white Americans were raised in poor neighborhoods, for Black Americans this number is 62%. Inequality between Black and white households has barely changed since 1970. Patrick Sharkey shows how important neighborhoods are in explaining persistent racial inequality in this country, demonstrating how the poverty rate and racial composition of neighborhoods endure over time and across generations of families. One of the central tenets of the American Dream is the idea of social mobility—that it is possible to move up in the world, to get a better job, move to a safer neighborhood, buy a bigger house—yet, as Sharkey shows, for some groups in the U.S., this is simply not possible.
Trailer parks and mobile homes make up the largest segment of the unassisted affordable housing market in this country. And while most mobile homes aren’t actually ambulatory, most mobile home owners don’t actually own the ground beneath them. This makes them susceptible to eviction in a way that homeowners typically are not. Through the detailed stories of the residents Sullivan got to know personally, she highlights the largely unseen and highly unstable nature of the manufactured home industry.
In this Pulitzer Prize-winning book, Desmond tells the gut-wrenching story of the “hidden housing problem”: eviction. While we typically think of poverty as causing housing instability—a family loses their income, cannot pay rent, and then gets evicted from their home—Evicted shows how we have been looking at things upside down. In fact, he argues, housing instability causes poverty. When a person gets evicted, their job is jeopardized, their children’s grades are threatened, their mental and physical health at risk. Through the personal stories of several families and the landlords who house them, Desmond shows the devastating effects of a housing system that does more harm than good for so many who live in this country.
“It doesn’t make a damned bit of difference who wins the war to someone who’s dead.”
When these words appear in Joseph Heller’s satirical antiwar novel Catch-22, they refer to World War II. But they could just as easily be about today’s “war” against the invisible threat of COVID-19. Winning a war is only beneficial to those who live past the war’s end. And, as U.S. workers are increasingly called to stay at or return to work, growing numbers of them won’t survive to see a post-coronavirus world.
There’s nothing new about the expectation that, in times of crisis, ordinary people must die in order to leave a better world for the rest—but Catch-22 is a rare work of fiction that challenges this notion. In 2020, it provides a valuable window into the American tradition of ignoring the human cost of victory. And reading it now also allows for a deeper appreciation of just how well it pinpointed the absurdity of “noble sacrifice.”
The book’s protagonist, Capt. John Yossarian, wasn’t willing to die for the war—and this is precisely what makes Catch-22 one of the most enduring and important war novels to date. It’s a vicious satire of the war industry and a piercing reflection on humanity’s deepest secrets, but it stands out most for featuring a wartime protagonist unwilling to sacrifice himself. Published in 1961, among a body of U.S. war literature that glorified patriotic sacrifice, Catch-22 offered an alternative: the idea that wanting to stay alive is a noble cause, too.
The novel’s nonlinear narrative is propelled by the deaths of Yossarian’s friends and acquaintances, which inspire Yossarian to avoid combat in increasingly drastic ways. At first those deaths appear distant and bloodless (Kraft was “dumped unceremoniously into doom,” while Clevinger simply disappeared inside a cloud). As the book progresses, though, the death scenes become increasingly shocking and visceral, culminating in Catch-22’s goriest, and perhaps most famous, scene: the death of Snowden.
Published among a body of U.S. war literature that glorified patriotic sacrifice, Catch-22 offered an alternative: the idea that wanting to stay alive is a noble cause, too.
Deaths from COVID-19 also appear distant and bloodless at first. Upon closer look, though, they slowly reveal their full horror. We hear that patients are put on ventilators, and imagine a neat, simple oxygen mask. In reality, the ventilators often used in COVID-19 cases involve a tube pushed into the airway to take over the process of breathing for a patient whose lungs no longer work. We hear of cold- and flu-like symptoms, and imagine the mild illnesses we’ve recovered from before. In reality, the coronavirus can wreak havoc on internal organs in ways we’re just beginning to understand, damaging the heart, lungs, kidneys, liver, intestines, eyes, and even the brain.
This is the gory, visceral threat faced by workers now. At first, “essential workers” like janitors, grocery store clerks, and delivery drivers were the only ones risking infection to keep their jobs. But now, states and cities are in a foolish push to reopen mid-pandemic. The people caught up in the reopening sweep are mainly those who can’t work from home, like restaurant and retail workers, hair stylists, tattoo artists, and teachers. However, some offices are choosing to reopen even when the work could be done remotely, so many office workers must now risk infection for their jobs, too.
Most people cannot live without work—even when work threatens their lives. If an employee chooses not to return to work at a reopened business, they’ll lose the job and their unemployment benefits all at once. Without this income, of course, they’ll eventually lose access to necessities like housing and food.
Catch-22’s military leaders didn’t permit opting out; neither does modern capitalism.
From the start of this crisis, workers have been praised for putting their bodies in the virus’s line of fire. But while their sacrifices are brave, this praise narrative is deeply oversimplified. Like Yossarian, they are in a system that makes them feel they have no choice. Catch-22’s military leaders didn’t permit opting out; neither does modern capitalism. And like Yossarian, some workers are opting out anyway. They’re taking time off, organizing for better working conditions, or simply quitting. They’re choosing the risks of financial insecurity, employer retaliation, and public derision, over the risk of death.
While all non-remote workers are now caught in this impossible bind, essential workers have faced it from the pandemic’s start. They’ve been publicly praised, yet rarely given pay, benefits, or safety gear to match the risks of going to work now—much like Yossarian, who was rewarded with a useless medal while asked to fly an ever-increasing number of combat missions. Or, they’re like Yossarian’s roommate Orr, who had “a thousand valuable skills that would keep him in a low income group all his life.”
These employees—often underpaid, unappreciated, and disrespectfully called “unskilled”—were only deemed “essential” when powers-that-be realized that the economy rests on their backs. Without people in industries like cleaning, manufacturing, and transportation, businesses can’t run, and people can’t access the things they need to live. Suddenly, these workers became exemplars of honorable sacrifice who keep the country running in spite of COVID-19.
Yet many “essential” employees don’t actually do anything required for the survival of others. People like construction workers and Starbucks baristas don’t provide necessary services in a pandemic. They could have been safely at home collecting temporary unemployment all along. Instead, they’ve been risking their lives at work, and they’re now being joined by all the non-essential employees called to return. Most workers are essential to the profits of their industries, not to life itself.
Those industry profits are not insignificant: Jeff Bezos alone was already $34.6 billion richer by mid-May thanks to the pandemic, while at least eight Amazon warehouse workers have died of coronavirus. (The actual number of COVID-19 deaths at Amazon is almost certainly higher, but the company refuses to disclose the information.) But then again, World War II was profitable for those at the top and deadly for those at the bottom as well. As Yossarian said to Major Major, “Some people are getting killed and a lot more are making money and having fun.”
Even though lives are at stake for workers, quitting isn’t easy. Quitting itself is a heroic act.
Still, even though lives are at stake for workers, quitting isn’t easy. It means facing worse economic instability than they already face, not to mention possible employer retaliation and diminished future job prospects. It means accepting an interminable period of unpaid unemployment as the economy crashes into an unprecedented depression. Quitting itself is a heroic act.
Quitting wasn’t easy for Yossarian, either. In another war novel, wanting to quit the war would have made him a pitiful character at best, a cowardly one at worst. In Catch-22, it made him a hero. Heller painstakingly shares Yossarian’s internal and external struggles as he fights to quit in a system that only wants his sacrifice, so we can see just how heroic quitting is: “He stepped into the briefing room with mixed emotions, uncertain how he was supposed to feel about Kraft and the others, for they had all died in the distance of a mute and secluded agony at a moment when he was up to his own ass in the same vile, excruciating dilemma of duty and damnation.”
On all sides, our protagonist is assailed by threats to his life (“Catastrophes were lurking everywhere, too numerous to count”), but the worst come from people supposedly on his side. The risks of opting out of combat missions are significant—Yossarian’s superiors threaten to court-martial or even shoot him if he does. But the risks of continuing to fly missions also can’t be denied, as Yossarian sees nearly everyone he cares about systematically killed.
Eventually, he realizes running away from combat entirely is the only reasonable choice, a choice which he must defend:
“But you can’t just turn your back on all your responsibilities and run away from them,’ Major Danby insisted. “It’s such a negative move. It’s escapist.”
Yossarian laughed with buoyant scorn and shook his head. “I’m not running away from my responsibilities. I’m running to them. There’s nothing negative about running away to save my life. You know who the escapists are, don’t you, Danby? Not me and Orr.”
Such a comedic, poignant, deserter-as-hero narrative was virtually unheard of at the time Catch-22 was published. In 1895, Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage had set the stage for 20th-century U.S. war literature: its protagonist initially runs from battle, but spends the rest of the book overcoming his shame and fear to return to the fight. The main character in Ernest Hemingway’s 1929 A Farewell to Arms does desert the war, but love rather than self-preservation is the catalyst—and he meets a desolate fate in the end anyway. Norman Mailer’s 1948 The Naked and the Dead depicts war as meaningless and futile, but kills off its most frightened character in an embarrassing scene early on.
Catch-22 broke ranks. In creating a protagonist whose nobility sparks from his desire to live, Heller made one of the most compelling statements of any antiwar movement to date: that an individual life is more important than the ideals of country, honor, or sacrifice.
Heller was a bombardier in the war himself, and personally witnessed death over Avignon and other wartime experiences almost exactly like Yossarian’s. As his book caught on and the term “catch-22” worked its way into the popular lexicon, Heller remained adamant that the term did not apply to just any ironic or paradoxical situation. To him, a true catch-22 had to be dire and life-threatening—precisely like the situation workers face now. They can go to work, where they may die. Or, they can choose not to go to work, thus giving up the resources they need to live.
Perhaps someday we will have a work of fiction that satirizes the coronavirus era as well as Catch-22 satirized World War II. For now, though, Heller’s war novel remains remarkably relevant to 2020’s cruel absurdities. After all, it really isn’t a satire of a specific war, but of American leaders’ indifference to the price of victory—which is why the Vietnam War initially helped make the book successful. Now, COVID-19 shows once again that its message is timeless.
We should criticize the systems that ask people to put their lives on the line, not the people who choose to opt out.
Yossarian lives. That’s the most important fact of the book: that he finds his way out of an impossible-seeming situation and saves himself in the end. Not only does he live, but he does so with virtue and grace. He even refuses a soft, safe, unethical deal offered by his superiors, which would get him out of the war in exchange for his silence on atrocities. Instead, he quits in his own way, against all rules and advice.
As COVID-19’s death toll rises, some employees are choosing to quit their jobs and save themselves. It may sound radical to praise them. It may even seem to diminish the sacrifices of those who choose to stay. But it doesn’t. For anyone who isn’t permitted to work from home, work is now a war zone—and Catch-22 reminds us that opting out of this life-threatening situation is noble. Self-preservation deserves praise. We should criticize the systems that ask people to put their lives on the line, not the people who choose to opt out.
Not all of today’s workers get to be Yossarians, though. Many will be Krafts or Clevingers or Snowdens: casualties placed in the vise of war by careless U.S. leadership. These workers deserve honor and remembrance. But let’s remember the Yossarians of the COVID-19 front lines, the ones who quit in the face of the enemy. They’re heroes, too.
Now that you’ve cut up every eggplant, lemon, pizza, and soap bottle in your house looking for hidden cakes, you may think you’re safe from the universal cakening. Bad news: many of the books hidden on your shelves are also cake. You didn’t know, because you haven’t read them. Nobody has. If they say they have, they’re lying, because if they’d read them, they’d know they are cake. The following books are cake and have always been cake.
People love to talk about The Anxiety of Influence, much as they love to talk about cake. However, they have not read it, because if they had they’d know it was cake.
Only Brontë completists would know that Villette is cake. But they don’t know, because there are no true Brontë completists, because they haven’t read Villette, on account of how it’s cake.
The Riverside Shakespeare
The Riverside Shakespeare contains a thin layer of cake between Antony and Cleopatra and The Winter’s Tale.
When I finally made it to Marlboro Country, I knew it because I didn’t have to work anymore. Herds moved themselves and we all just sort of waited, looking intently into nothing, waiting for a sign.
Still, my clothes got dirty. The spurs we wore were just for show: our horses always saddled and ready to ride forever through the haze of the countryside.
My grandfather was nearby, down the gravel road in Winston Country. The horses were smaller down there. The people bought canned food and Budweiser. They all wanted to live in Marlboro Country.
Every day, the sun set over our statue of the Marlboro Man. In his mouth, we kept a cigarette burning, always. In case he ever showed up, we wanted him to know we were always thinking of him.
Solvents
for Vachel Lindsay
“They tried to get me; I got them first!”- The last words of Vachel Lindsay
in washing his windows, my brother Noah nearly killed himself south of Springfield mistaking Windex for Gatorade from a plastic cup on a kitchen counter he is replacing after 40 years of holding breakfast and ashtrays.
he remedied the toxin with some crackers and well water, then, in switching to Anheuser-Busch, he called the Poison Control Center before he called me.
BUT I FEEL FINE he said, and I asked if his insides held the television crows who never could tell what they had in just hanging from the power lines. He said WHAT?
He wants me to know that his neighbor to the south just went belly up. He called him at midnight to cry, saying that even if he sold everything, he would still be a half a million in the hole.
I thought of our neighbor Vachel Lindsay drinking Lysol just a few miles north, the taxmen circling his childhood home too, bankruptcy buried like turnips forever across the fields scaffolding Springfield.
Given the time, we all till until we reach the bottom, exposing black earth and eating of it deeply, nourished by its chemical bread and in knowing that we have done good, honest work.
Until reading Quan Barry’s latest novel, We Ride Upon Sticks, I had no idea the 1692 Salem witch trials hadn’t actually taken place in Salem, Massachusetts. The hysteria emerged in the nearby town of what was then called Salem Village, and is now called Danvers. “Honestly, of all places on earth, the Town of Danvers should have seen us coming,” Barry writes. In We Ride Upon Sticks, Barry—a Danvers native—places us in 1989 amongst a coven fueled by Pat Benatar, peroxide, and dark deeds scrawled in an Emilio Estevez notebook. Her witches? The 1989 Danvers High School Women’s Varsity Field Hockey team.
When the novel begins, the team has suffered a lot of losses. Suddenly, in the summer of 1989, they start winning. Their goalie has taken matters into her own hands by pledging herself to the powers of darkness in an Emilio Estevez notebook, and one by one, she convinces her teammates to join her. The girls’ actions get steadily darker as they chronicle their misdeeds in the notebook simply referred to as “Emilio,” who “would become a record of our offerings, a shadow book documenting our efforts on behalf of the dark.” They keep winning—and the girls start thinking collectively. But despite their shared thoughts, the girls occasionally remain capable of keeping secrets from one another.
The excess of the decade wafts over the story like hairspray (“Ave the ’80s! The only thing bigger than our hair was our outfits”), although Barry doesn’t neglect the ways in which things were worse for women, queer people, and people of color (“What did our mothers call it? Bad sex. What would our daughters call it? Rape”). The girls’ individual coming-of-age stories weave in and out of their collective identity, through field hockey and ritual and ’80s aesthetics, everything escalating as the team fights through the season.
Currently a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Quan Barry was herself a member of the 1989 Danvers Field Hockey Team. She is the author of the novel She Weeps Each Time You’re Born, as well as four poetry collections, most recently Loose Strife. Over the phone, we talked about DIY witchcraft, self-advocacy, collective power, and which ’80s heartthrobs are still crushing it (hint: it’s Keanu).
Deirdre Coyle: We Ride Upon Sticks is written in first-person plural, the field hockey team’s collective “we.” To me, this point of view seems daunting, but it felt very natural and appropriate in the story. How did you decide on this point of view?
Quan Barry: Obviously there are a few examples of “we” plural voices in literature, probably the most famous one being Jeffrey Eugenides’The Virgin Suicides. In that book, you get a group of boys who are watching this family of girls, and this group of boys tells the story.
I always knew that I wanted [We Ride Upon Sticks] to be a first-person plural voice, I just wasn’t sure whose voice it was going to be. When I first started writing it, I thought that maybe it was going to be the entire school watching this girls’ field hockey team, but that didn’t quite work. And then I thought that maybe it was gonna be the freshman team. Oftentimes with sports, you have a freshman team, a junior varsity team, and a varsity team. I remember being a freshman girl myself, and usually what happens is that the freshman girls are just, like, obsessed with the senior girls. They just seem so much older, like they’re adults, and they can drive. [The freshmen girls] sort of stalk them in various ways, and know all kinds of things about the senior girls. But when I tried doing that, it became very obvious very quickly that I couldn’t really explain why these freshman girls would have certain access to certain scenes or why they would know certain things. And then I realized, “Oh, it’s just the team itself. They’re the ones telling the story”—my joke being that there’s no “I” in “team.”
I also think that, finally, making it first-person plural adds a sort of witchy element to the book. Not only is it first-person plural, but there’s also some collective thinking that happens along the way, and first-person plural allowed me to have that sort of otherworldly element in the book as well.
DC: It’s very eerie in all the right moments. The girls write their pledges to “Darkness,” “Dearest Darkness,” rather than an explicit “devil” or other figure. What made you decide to keep this darkness broad and vague?
QB: I really see the witchcraft in the book as not a major element. In many ways, it’s more about the girls finding themselves, and their friendships, and discovering who they are. So I saw the witchcraft in general as being very DIY. They don’t have a particular program or way of going about it exactly; they’re discovering it as they go. So it made sense to me that it would be broader. Like I said, it’s just kind of a do-it-yourself thing. One of the things that I was really concerned with in the book is that even though they are dabbling in the darker arts, I wanted them to still be sympathetic. So even when they do create mayhem, you’re hopefully still rooting for them. Similarly, for me, keeping it broader allows the reader to maintain sympathy. I felt like if these girls actually were pledging themselves to a very specific, goat-headed devil, that it would be easy to lose sympathy with them. You could even make the argument that in the end, the darker power that they’re playing with is just the idea of the sun and the moon. The sun is sort of a bright object, and the moon is darker in certain ways. It’s a darkness that we all have, and which we do draw power from, you know? I was interested in exploring that side of things. Like okay, so, when you do look to your—I want to say to your “instincts,” even, as opposed to your “baser instincts”—but even just when you follow your gut, where will that take you? That’s one of the reasons why I decided not to have it be a more specific darkness.
DC: ’80s pop culture permeates the story, most notably in the Emilio Estevez notebook in which the girls sign their names and pledge themselves to “Darkness.” In an era with so many teen heartthrobs, how did you settle on Emilio to represent the Prince of Darkness?
QB: (Laughs)Well, a friend of mine who was on the field hockey team had two celebrity crushes back in the day that you would see in her locker every time she opened it. One of them was Emilio Estevez. The other one was a person whose name we didn’t know how to pronounce at the time, and that was “Keenu” Reeves, right? So, in thinking about quote-unquote “Keenu” Reeves—obviously, the guy is still crushing it, he’s still around career-wise, 35 years later—in some ways, it wouldn’t have made sense to have it be Keanu Reeves. But Emilio Estevez I feel like, in many ways, was emblematic of that time period. A lot of younger readers might not know who Judd Nelson is, for example, because he doesn’t have the same kind of presence? I think Emilio Estevez, because he comes from the Sheen-Estevez acting dynasty—even though he himself is not in the spotlight, obviously his father [Martin Sheen] is still known, his brother [Charlie Sheen] is still known—and I’ve always found something very innocuous, in the best way, about his look. I think he probably has played villains, maybe? But I couldn’t really name any. If you think about The Breakfast Club and the character he plays in it, which is this kind of good-hearted jock, it just seems like who he is, you know what I mean? There are a few other people who you could picture who maybe would have dark sides in them, and so, you know, making them the object of darkness might make sense. But with [Emilio Estevez], he just seems so cherubic that it’s kind of a disconnect. And from what I’ve heard, he’s a very, very, very nice guy. So there probably is a complete disconnect.
QB: He already has a little bit of that darkness, so.
DC: You were on the 1989 Danvers field hockey team, right?
QB: Yes.
DC: You mentioned in another interview that the only character explicitly based on someone from that time was your coach.
QB: You know, when I first started writing the book, I basically had a draft of it done, and then my editor told me that my field hockey coach had passed away. I told my editor her name, and she did some searching, and she’s like, “Oh, she passed away a few months ago,” when I was writing this novel. This is not creative non-fiction, you know, it’s fiction, and for legal reasons, you can’t have characters based on actual people. But after she had passed away, that freed me up to have a character based on her. So I went back in and tweaked her in such a way that it made it even more obvious that it is Barb, Barb Damon, as an homage to her. She passed away in 2019, I think she was 82 years old. But yes, she is the only character in the book based on [a real person].
DC: That sounds like a very fitting tribute; she’s such a great character. So there are a lot of really amazing descriptions of the girls discovering their power, whether they’re “frenzied maenads” running off the field, or druid queens with blue-painted faces. Did any of that residual power come from your experiences playing field hockey?
QB: I think yes. I had been interested for a very long time in the idea of groups of girls and what happens when you get them together. Because I think it’s different when you get a group of girls together than when you get a group of boys together, you know? There are obviously a lot of sports books, movies based on boys’ team sports, you know, football, basketball, Hoop Dreams, Friday Night Lights, that kind of thing. But when it comes to girls in sports, it’s usually things like ice skating or gymnastics. You don’t really see that many girls’ sports movies or books. I mean, there was Bend It Like Beckham some years ago, but that was about it. And because I grew up in the town of Danvers, which used to be Salem Village, where the first incidents happened that led to the Salem witch hysteria, or the Salem witch trials, I was always interested in how that ended up happening. And I think that there was something about the collective, you know? It built on itself. A few girls said these things, and then it began to snowball, and become bigger and bigger. I was interested in how that kind of thing happens.
When you put on a jersey, you take on an identity. Sometimes that’s for good, and sometimes that’s for bad, you know?
In thinking about playing field hockey myself, I could see how when you’re part of a team, in general—it’s not just about a field hockey team or anything—but when you put on a jersey, you take on an identity. And sometimes that’s for good, and sometimes that’s for bad, you know? So we see it with, for example, sports hooliganism, particularly in Europe. A lot of soccer fans put on jerseys and unfortunately do bad things, kind of in the names of their teams, right? There’s a kind of fanaticism that can come with sports. It’s also a sense of community, so there’s a plus side to it, and there’s also a dark side to it.
I remember being part of the team and there’s a way in which you feel positively connected to these people, and in certain ways it makes you feel braver. I’ve had the pleasure recently of going back to my hometown and giving a reading there, and a lot of my friends from the team came. There are literally some people who I have not seen since the day we graduated. But we talked about it, and we’re really excited about it—we have a little email chain going—hopefully this summer, depending on where the state of the world is, we’re hoping to get together and maybe actually hit some balls around. Like, it’d be fun, we should all get together, just mess around a bit. There’s something about it. I think we all just have really pleasant memories of playing together, being a team, and being friends. And you wouldn’t know we were all very different people, and we still are. We still have this common bond, even more than thirty years later.
DC: That’s so amazing, and very appropriate for the kind of story you’re telling in We Ride Upon Sticks. So the title of the book comes from the confession of Tituba, the first woman to be accused of witchcraft during the Salem trials. It’s so perfect for a story about a field hockey team.
QB: The original title of the book was actually “We ride upon sticks and are there presently.” That was her entire quote. She was maybe the third person to go before the trial.
DC: Oh, she wasn’t the first?
There was a lot of darkness happening in the ’80s. I wanted to show how things that were acceptable in the ’80s are no longer acceptable.
QB: Not the very first. And in thinking about it again, she was an enslaved woman. Even now, they’re not quite sure if she was—because there were Native American people who were enslaved—they weren’t sure if she was a Native American person who was enslaved, or if she was somebody who was originally of African origin. They’re not quite sure. But basically the thing I love about her, as the book discusses, is that she is the first person to confess to [witchcraft]. So she’s not the first person to go before a trial, but she’s the first person to actually confess. And in doing that, she kind of lays the blueprints for, “If you want to live, this is what you do: you confess, you make up a story, they’ll show mercy on you, and you won’t be killed,” basically. And so during her trial, as she’s confessing, they’re asking her for all these details. At one point, there’s an amazing question that they ask her. They’re like, “So how do you and the other witches, how do you guys travel to the coven that happens in Boston?” And she says, “We ride upon sticks and are there presently.” I have known that quote for a very long time, and I was hoping that the entire quote would be the title of the book, but it was not to be. (Laughs.)
DC: It’s great in both the short and long versions. There’s a line early in the book that felt relevant throughout the story: “When you don’t speak up, you get what you get.” It remains relevant as the characters decide what they want to talk about, and to whom, and as their inner voices enmesh into a collective voice. It’s also interesting in the context of the Salem witchcraft trials—when those women spoke and when they didn’t. You talk a lot about the differences, especially regarding gender and sexuality, between 1989 and 2019, when the frame story takes place. Were you thinking about how time has changed the ways in which people are more or less comfortable speaking up?
QB: I wasn’t necessarily thinking about it particularly through the lens of speaking up, but I was very much thinking about the ’80s and how now, we think, “Oh, the ’80s, they were a fun time; we like to dress up, and do our hair funny, and listen to the music.” But there was a lot of darkness happening in the ’80s as well, right? It was the time of the AIDS crisis, the Central Park Five. There was all kinds of stuff happening. I definitely wanted to show that aspect of it. Showing how time passes and how things that were acceptable in the ’80s are no longer acceptable, that’s definitely something that I was interested in thinking about.
There are scenes where [the girls are] talking about dating and consent, and how in 1989, what that looks like is obviously very different from what it looks like now. There are definitely moments in the book where people speak up about what they want, even as far as their sexuality is concerned—you know, Abby Putnam finally deciding that she’s had it with her on-again, off-again boyfriend, and wanted to advocate for herself, and what she does there. That kind of stuff. I was very much thinking about women and girls coming into power in various ways, and speaking their own truth.
I hadn’t particularly pulled out that line that you pulled out, but now that I think about it, I’m like, in many ways, yeah, it is kind of a mantra of the book: “When you don’t speak up, you get what you get.”In my life, I’m probably an over-communicator. Because I always feel like, if I told you what I needed, and then you couldn’t do that, then that’s on you. (Laughs.) I can’t expect people to be mind readers. That’s definitely something that I believe and that I try and live by. I can see that yes, in this book, these girls are very much learning to advocate for themselves and in doing so, then that puts it on the world. The world can’t meet their standards, right? Because they’ve said what they needed, and who they are.
I’ve always found writing difficult. Almost from the moment I learned to read, I knew that I wanted to be a writer, but I loved books so much that the idea of writing one felt fraught with danger and difficulty. The stakes, after all, were so high. I learned quickly of course that it was much more difficult to write a book than to read one. I was born worrying, my parents said, and once I discovered literature, I really had something to worry about.
Perhaps as a result, I’ve always found myself drawn to stories about artistic struggle, books in which the writer is failing to achieve what they believe to be their purpose in life. Call it arrested artistic development. My first novel, Early Work, was a parallel bildungsroman, a book about two writers moving together but in opposite directions, one towards the fulfillment of their goal, the other towards the hard realization that literary greatness probably isn’t right around the corner. My new book Cool for America is a series of linked stories about how people try to find their way past life’s impediments to realize some measure of contentment as artists and, occasionally, human beings. These are, for the most part, stories about the beginning and middle of this journey rather than its endpoint. After all, what life story ever gets more interesting after the subject achieves success? For the people I’m writing about, any kind of satisfaction is far from a foregone conclusion.
Below are some of my favorite works of literature about artists who are stymied in their attempts to fulfill their visions, both by the usual impediments—sloth, vanity, booze, love—and, sometimes, by the capricious workings of the outer world. Of course, the pleasing irony of all such books is that, no matter how long the odds may seem while one is reading them, they did all eventually get written. Otherwise there wouldn’t be a book at all.
Spiotta’s tricky, emotionally devastating novel is about a brother and sister duo fighting for artistic control over the narrative of their lives. The book’s central figure, Nik, is a musician who has established an elaborate private mythology for his work, which includes extensive writings, some in the voice of his sister, who, as his main audience, has often found herself in her brother’s shadow. The novel becomes, in her words, “the counter chronicles” to his version of the family story, a reclamation of her own life as a writer that requires her to push Nik’s vision of himself aside.
This short Austrian novel, published posthumously after the author’s archives were saved from being destroyed by the Nazis, is a jaundiced portrait of literary presumption. An aging civil servant named Saxberger’s early, obscurely published book of poems is suddenly taken up as an essential influence by a group of young writers, who hope to convey legitimacy upon themselves by raising the status of the older writer. When Saxberger is given the task of writing a new poem for the first time in decades for a literary reading, the results are… very disappointing. In the end, Schnitzler suggests, perhaps “no fame” would be preferable to late fame.
This is a scabrous, very funny piece of autofiction—somewhere between linked stories and a novel—about a young Black writer careening through bohemian New York in the early ’60s. (No, this is not the same Charles Wright who recently served as the poet laureate.) These are dispatches from a picaresque life of drugs and male hustlers, of late, hallucinatory nights and morning cigarettes. The narrator takes stock of himself in the mirror in a way that will be familiar to many an artist: “A fairly young man with a tired, boyish face, saddled with the knowledge of years and nothing gained, lacking a bird dog’s sense of direction most of the time, without point or goal.”
Chen’s elliptical novel is of the noble “failing to finish one’s dissertation tradition,” a situation I deeply relate to despite having never attempted to start a dissertation. A former competitive swimmer, the narrator is a sports historian fixated on stories of failure and disaster. She’s also trying to reckon with the suicide of her ex-boyfriend. Over the course of the book, the convergences between sports, life, and art become clearer and clearer. “If doing sport is to be ‘lost in focused intensity,’ as swimmer Pablo Morales said once,” she writes, “then watching sport is to be lost in the focused intensity of someone else’s focused intensity.” That sounds a lot like reading, too.
This is one of my favorite discoveries of the past few years. It tells the story of a ne’er-do-well alcoholic writer who gets a job as a tour guide at Pushkin Hills, an estate where the famous Russian writer once lived, now turned bleak tourist trap in the long middle age of the Soviet Union. He talks a lot about writing, and lampoons the efforts of his fellow guides (of course everyone who works there is a would-be writer), but between the drinking and trying to win back his ex-wife, he just can’t seem to find the time to put pen to paper. “You are not being published,” he says to himself. “But is that really what you dreamt of when you mumbled your first lines?” Well… yes.
A friend recently described this book as the best breakup novel ever written, and it might well be true. The narrator is fleeing from the aftermath—or is it merely the middle of the prolonged descent?—of a many-years’-long affair with a married man. She is a reporter, but she is having a great deal of trouble telling this story. “For a woman, it is always, don’t you see, Scheherazade,” she tells us cryptically. She finds compulsive narrative stride in the long episode set in Ireland, without a doubt the best rental car disaster sequence in American literature.
That Smellby Sonallah Ibrahim, translated from the Arabic by Robyn Creswell
This brief, searing Egyptian novel, originally published in 1966 and translated into stark English by Robyn Creswell in 2013, is narrated by a political prisoner recently released back to his home in Cairo, where he remains on house arrest. The narrator is a writer, but his experiences have shocked his nervous system such that it’s a struggle simply to get through the day, let alone convert what has happened to him into art. The recent New Directions edition of the book includes excerpts from notes Ibrahim secretly made while in prison, as strong a testament to his literary will as one can imagine.
Halfon’s book consists of three long intertwined stories, all dealing with the ways that the lives of those who have died can continue to haunt those who remain. Halfon is Guatemalan and Jewish, and his work is continually concerned with the aftermath of the Holocaust and with the genocide of indigenous people and other perceived political enemies of the government during Guatemala’s long civil war. The titular final piece in the book concerns the drowning death of the narrator’s uncle at age five in Lake Amititlán and its long aftermath. Halfon often writes about the difficulty of getting to the truth of the past, of being able to move forward without understanding what has come before. Ultimately, the artistic impediment that cannot be overcome is death.
Maybe you’ve had enough of the fireworks. Maybe you were heavily influenced by the “worst places in New York” Twitter discourse. Maybe you’ve just spent four months contemplating how you spend half your income to live in a tiny dark room. Whatever it is, you’re now fantasizing about saying Goodbye to All That. We cannot responsibly encourage you to move around the country right now, but we can help you get started on the inevitable personal essay you’ll write when you do!
Just find the first letter of your name in column A, the second letter in column B, and so on, and plug them into the sentence we’ve provided. So for instance, if you’re Joan Didion, you’d look for J in column A, O in column B, A in column C, etc.—and then when you ran out of letters in “Joan” you’d start on your last name. The result: “New York taught me apathy and how to walk two miles in heels, but now that I have massive debt it’s time to move to Berlin and retire early.” Man…. <stares blankly out tiny sliver of window I pay mumble mumble dollars for>… sounds great.
I don’t remember the precise day I became trans. It wasn’t a great revelation, but a decision that took place over a series of months, and later years. It began in 2013, the year before TIME Magazine announced what it called the “trans tipping point,” the point at which trans presence in public discourse would become unignorable. My personal tipping point was less a point than a process, even a course of study. My gradual migration was aided by the genderqueer and nonbinary people whose blogs I followed. Reading their stories, I realized that I, too, could live a trans life, and I did not have to be a man in order to do so.
After four years closeted in a Catholic high school, I came out as trans the summer before my first year of college. Between my freshman and junior years, I got a formal diagnosis of “gender dysphoria,” began a low dose of testosterone, received a bilateral mastectomy, and later a hysterectomy. Today I am not “cured” of some sickness named dysphoria, but live with a happiness whose baseline is considerably higher than it used to be. After years of searching, my body is now not quite so formidable an enemy.
In the eyes of medicine, I only became legitimately trans at the moment of dysphoria diagnosis, after proving to doctors I was credibly disordered. Generations of personal and medical narratives have made this story of trans-as-sickness ubiquitous, even compulsory. The earliest of these narratives typically focus on trans women, whose renunciation of manhood and its privileges was pathologized alongside their gender-crossing. With the 1977 publication of Emergence: A Transsexual Autobiography, the first published memoir authored by a trans man, author Mario Martino joined this lineage, outlining the contours of respectable disorder for bodies like his. That is, bodies like ours.
In the eyes of medicine, I only became legitimately trans at the moment of dysphoria diagnosis, after proving to doctors I was credibly disordered.
When Martino sought gender-affirming medical intervention, at the time called “sex reassignment,” only a small number of medical professionals could help him. The few who did offer biomedical transition followed guidelines created by a doctor named Harry Benjamin, who––in Martino’s words––”gave respectability to the gender-disoriented.” Benjamin ranked trans patients (again, typically women) on a scale from “pseudo-transvestite” to “true-transsexual,” only the latter of whom qualified for biomedical interventions like hormone replacement therapy and surgery. To be a “true-transsexual,” one had to conform entirely to gendered roles of the place and era in which they lived: the trans women Benjamin worked with were feminine, heterosexual, docile, and sought husbands––they adhered to misogynistic expectations of what women were supposed to be. Martino supported the use of stereotypes as a barometer for true-transness, praising trans women who were meek and servile. Unsurprisingly, he saved the bulk of his paternalism and venom for the women he deemed too shrill.
Martino argued for his legitimacy as a man by way of his spirited, independent, “boyish” childhood, as well as the sense that “males are [his] brothers” rather than potential sexual partners. While I did not grow up a tomboy (nor did I identify outside girlhood before my adolescence), Martino was “born this way,” certain he was a boy from the time he could think it. While my lesbian and trans identities amplify and intertwine with one another, Martino was disgusted and horrified to be associated with lesbianism. He considered his pre-transition relationships with women to be heterosexual, yet disabled by “incorrect” anatomy. My own pursuit of a “gender dysphoria” diagnosis was resentful, and I was angry that I had to be marked “defective” in order to exercise bodily autonomy. Martino leaned into his diagnosis, relieved he was “a legitimate patient: not a homosexual, transvestite, schizoid, psychopath, or exhibitionist!” but a man trapped in the wrong body and in need of a medical diagnosis and eventual cure. His simple longing for a straight and narrow future, combined with a willingness to fully discard his wrong-body and past life to embody an ideal manhood, allowed him the vanishingly-rare opportunity for medical transition according to Benjamin’s guidelines.
Narrators like Martino reinforce the idea that to transition is to go from sick to recovered and from deviant to normal.
In line with Benjamin’s thinking, and with “transmedicalist” beliefs that linger today, Martino believed transness was a sickness only doctors could cure. His ultimate thesis was an argument for a true-self, visible and possible only through medical recognition. His autobiography—a file of evidence approved in its foreword by Dr. Benjamin—works to justify this truth, a documentation of his linear transition from diagnosis, to hormones and a year of required “role-play” as a man, to a mastectomy, hysterectomy, and finally a then-experimental phalloplasty. He both became and had always been a man, the embodiment of a central transmedical contradiction that applies to all forms of gendered existence. We must groom and fuck and purchase our ways entirely toward the “real wo/manhood” we have ostensibly been born into. In truth, there is no attaining these ideals, but the process of attempting them has produced a centuries-old story whose binary genders remain intact today. Emergence reinforces a hegemonic definition of what “trans” is, telling a story not of choice and experience but of diagnosis and doom. Narrators like Martino have helped to create the “born-in-the-wrong-body” myth, reinforcing the idea that to transition is to go from sick to recovered and from deviant to normal.
Medical diagnosis and familiar body-angst notwithstanding, my approach to transness was and is an atypical one, especially compared to Martino’s. As I moved away from womanhood, I chose butch lesbianism: framing my relationships to women and other non-men as unmistakably queer. At the same time, after I received hormones and surgery, my butchness grew effeminate rather than stereotypically masculine. Through it all, I have kept my given name, Sarah, and along with it I have kept alive the memory of the little girl I used to be. Surgeries behind me, I am now free to speak my true feelings on the (non-)nature of my identity: trans is a trail I have chosen to walk, one response of many to a set of feelings whose origins will never be fully known.
“Trans” is a dynamic term, changing in accordance with the experiences of those who claim it, including me. I refuse the circumstances of my birth and the opportunity for straight transition I have been offered. I have my testosterone and keep my birth name. My denial of cisness and of legal “opposite-gender” recognition lets me imagine a reckless space––a trans space––that I can share with like-minded others. While “transsexualism is not what [Martino] would have wished” for himself, he uses the limited material and ideological tools available to him to correct what he perceives as an illness. He even pens an autobiography he hopes will be taken as gospel when determining the veracity of other trans men’s claims. Martino would likely consider me a mere confused homosexual female, whose queer, lesbian, halfway body would disgust him. He slams the medical gates to trans identity closed behind him as he passes and pulls up the welcome-mat.
I do not belong in Martino’s trans. He, it appears, does not belong in mine, and his story reinforces ideals antithetical to my radical trans philosophy and politic. Still, our shared decision to take hormones and seek surgical interventions are irrevocably linked, forcing us into an uneasy kinship. I cannot avoid this truth any more than I can avoid the circumstances of my own girlhood, which at first seems to contradict my current relationship to gender: no matter what I do, the Sarah I am remains, and they or she remembers.
Reading my story through the lens of transness requires me to share in this often-contradictory constellation of narratives.
Reading my story through the lens of transness requires me to share in this often-contradictory constellation of narratives. In my own reading, I have had to confront stories that threaten my understanding of what “trans” is, stories that seem to undermine my own place in it. To take part in the trans story requires an acknowledgement of, even attention to, this lineage, which treats transness as property and dysphoria as capital. Martino’s story gained legitimacy specifically by rejecting my experience. He gained legitimacy by rejecting the existence of innumerable queer and gender non-conforming trans people, including Lou Sullivan, a gay trans man and activist whose requests for biomedical transition were refused repeatedly because he was gay. Sullivan’s ultimately-successful campaign to access hormones and surgery, and to allow other queer trans people to do the same, began contemporaneously with the release of Emergence. Both men were trans, or “transsexual” in the language of the era. Both are elements of the legacy I carry to this day. Yet, Martino’s trans terrorizes Sullivan’s and my own. Martino looms above me, threatening to demolish the life I have made for myself at the slightest misstep. History threatens to eat me alive.
No matter how ardently I refuse all association with Emergence, to do so is to reinforce binaries akin to those I reject. I would feel dishonest refusing any association with Martino, given that “trans” is, if nothing else, about the ability to hold contradictory truths at once. My initial urge to wholly disclaim transmedicalist narratives is counterproductive if I want to genuinely transform what “trans” can be. Our power, after all, lies in our ability to be many-at-once, to harness and transform language in ways previously unimagined.
I choose a nonbinary approach, and hold two contradictory truths at once.
Far from policing the gates of trans-storytelling, we have the ability to critically, honestly read unsavory parts of our history, while at the same time storming the gates of gender-legitimacy, ripping the doors to the house of trans off their hinges. This does not require an oversimplification of “trans,” a reduction of a complex array of lives and values, to a shared “not-cisness.” Instead, we can take this semantic connection to people like Martino, and use that connection to untell the stories that threaten to speak for us all and restrict our self-determination.
In my time researching his narrative and others, I have chosen neither to fully incorporate essentialists such as Martino into my vision, nor refuse association with the stories that, for better or worse, helped to form the “trans” we live today. Instead, I choose a nonbinary approach, and hold two contradictory truths at once. Martino’s story both is and is not trans: while it is located in the metanarrative of trans history, its conservatism precludes it from solidarity with the lives and communities we cultivate today. Perhaps Emergence was the most daring work he could have written at the time of its publication, the views it espouses have and continue to threaten trans peoples’ autonomy, including my own. Rather than living the life of trans misery Martino describes, I have come to understand trans is also a site of great joy. While I am heartbroken that we live in a world in which infants are marked by a litany of structural forces, self-determination compromised before they are capable of understanding it. The queer, trans communities I find myself part of, the play and experimentation I am able to do in direct defiance of cisheteronormativity: these are some of my life’s greatest pleasures.
In our series “Can Writing Be Taught?” we partner with Catapult to ask their course instructors all our burning questions about the process of teaching writing. This month we’re talking to Megan Giddings, author of Lakewood, who is teaching an upcoming six-week workshop on creating characters in fiction. We asked Giddings our standard ten questions, and she talked to us about learning from thorny problems, drinking seltzer as a treat, and figuring out how to write even when nobody’s paying attention.
What’s the best thing you’ve ever gotten out of a writing class or workshop as a student?
I learned that often when people keep talking about the same thing in a story and try to diagnose what’s wrong with it, that’s usually the most alive part. You might have to alter how it’s written, but it’s probably the thing the story needs to actually be worth reading.
What’s the worst thing you’ve ever gotten out of a writing class or workshop as a student?
I had an instructor tell me that she didn’t think “I had it” and I should think seriously about maybe switching from fiction to poetry. If I had been a younger writer, it probably would’ve killed my writing for a long time to have someone in authority say that to me.
What is the lesson or piece of writing advice you return to most as an instructor?
Learn to love specificity.
Does everyone “have a novel in them”?
Yes.
Would you ever encourage a student to give up writing? Under what circumstances?
There’s a big difference between writing because you love it and writing because you want money, attention, praise.
I wouldn’t ever encourage a student to give up writing, but I would point them toward learning how to write without getting attention. There’s a big difference between writing because you love it and the process and writing because you want money, attention, praise. The latter will only hurt you throughout your career. Writing and knowing it might just be for you and learning to be fine with that is important.
What’s more valuable in a workshop, praise or criticism?
Neither. A good question is the most valuable thing you can take from a workshop.
Should students write with publication in mind? Why or why not?
Students shouldn’t draft with publication in mind, but when they’re at a point where they’re making a serious revision, they should start thinking about readers. Drafting with publication in mind will often kill creativity.
In one or two sentences, what’s your opinion of these writing maxims?
Kill your darlings: It feels more like something that should be on a t-shirt than something that actually helps most writers.
Show don’t tell: Depends on the point of view you’re writing!
Write what you know: I think the better advice would be write what you emotionally know. In like 75% of circumstances, you can do research.
Character is plot: I’m not mad at it. I think complexity of self is the plot of an average day, so why be against it in fiction?
What’s the best hobby for writers?
Anything that makes you regularly fail and fail, so that the process of writing and revising and sending out doesn’t feel so frustrating.
What’s the best workshop snack?
As an instructor, I just drink seltzer water because I am old enough to sometimes think of things like that as a nice treat. But when I was a student, it would be a baked good someone else in the workshop made and plunked in the middle of the table.
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